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LAUGHTER

AN ESSAY ON THE MEANING OF THE COMIC

BY HENRI BERGSON

MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE PROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE

AUTHORISED TRANSLATION

BY CLOUDESLEY BRERETON L. ES L. (PARIS), M.A. (CANTAB)

AND FRED ROTHWELL B.A. (LONDON)

TRANSLATORS' PREFACE

This work, by Professor Bergson, has been revised in detail by the

author himself, and the present translation is the only authorised

one. For this ungrudging labour of revision, for the thoroughness

with which it has been carried out, and for personal sympathy in

many a difficulty of word and phrase, we desire to offer our

grateful acknowledgment to Professor Bergson. It may be pointed out

that the essay on Laughter originally appeared in a series of three

articles in one of the leading magazines in France, the Revue de

Paris. This will account for the relatively simple form of the work

and the comparative absence of technical terms. It will also explain

why the author has confined himself to exposing and illustrating his

novel theory of the comic without entering into a detailed

discussion of other explanations already in the field. He none the

less indicates, when discussing sundry examples, why the principal

theories, to which they have given rise, appear to him inadequate.

To quote only a few, one may mention those based on contrast,

exaggeration, and degradation.

The book has been highly successful in France, where it is in its

seventh edition. It has been translated into Russian, Polish, and

Swedish. German and Hungarian translations are under preparation.

Its success is due partly to the novelty of the explanation offered

of the comic, and partly also to the fact that the author

incidentally discusses questions of still greater interest and

importance. Thus, one of the best known and most frequently quoted

passages of the book is that portion of the last chapter in which

the author outlines a general theory of art.

C. B. F. R.

CHAPTER I

THE COMIC IN GENERAL—

THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS AND MOVEMENTS--

EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC.

What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable?

What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-

andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and

a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us

invariably the same essence from which so many different products

borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The

greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this

little problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of

slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge

flung at philosophic speculation. Our excuse for attacking the

problem in our turn must lie in the fact that we shall not aim at

imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it,

above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be, we shall

treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine ourselves to

watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptible gradations

from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve the strangest

metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen. Maybe we may

gain from this prolonged contact, for the matter of that, something

more flexible than an abstract definition,--a practical, intimate

acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship. And maybe

we may also find that, unintentionally, we have made an acquaintance

that is useful. For the comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in

its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its madness. It

dreams, I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are

at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social group. Can

it then fail to throw light for us on the way that human imagination

works, and more particularly social, collective, and popular

imagination? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not

also have something of its own to tell us about art and life?

At the outset we shall put forward three observations which we look

upon as fundamental. They have less bearing on the actually comic

than on the field within which it must be sought.

I

The first point to which attention should be called is that the

comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A

landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant

and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal,

but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or

expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of,

in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that

men have given it,--the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It

is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has

not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers.

Several have defined man as "an animal which laughs." They might

equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for

if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same

effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the

stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.

Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the

ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as

though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it

fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm

and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter

has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not

laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even

with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our

affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a

society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no

more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas

highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every

event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither

know nor understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to become

interested in everything that is being said and done; act, in

imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a

word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the

touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume

importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Now step aside,

look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn

into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to the sound of

music, in a room where dancing is going on, for the dancers at once

to appear ridiculous. How many human actions would stand a similar

test? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to

gay, on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To

produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something

like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to

intelligence, pure and simple.

This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other

intelligences. And here is the third fact to which attention should

be drawn. You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself

isolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo,

Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined

sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by

reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash,

to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain.

Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel

within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the

less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

It may, perchance, have happened to you, when seated in a railway

carriage or at table d'hote, to hear travellers relating to one

another stories which must have been comic to them, for they laughed

heartily. Had you been one of their company, you would have laughed

like them; but, as you were not, you had no desire whatever to do

so. A man who was once asked why he did not weep at a sermon, when

everybody else was shedding tears, replied: "I don't belong to the

parish!" What that man thought of tears would be still more true of

laughter. However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a

kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers,

real or imaginary. How often has it been said that the fuller the

theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience! On the

other hand, how often has the remark been made that many comic

effects are incapable of translation from one language to another,

because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social

group! It is through not understanding the importance of this double

fact that the comic has been looked upon as a mere curiosity in

which the mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange,

isolated phenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human

activity. Hence those definitions which tend to make the comic into

an abstract relation between ideas: "an intellectual contrast," "a

palpable absurdity," etc.,--definitions which, even were they really

suitable to every form of the comic, would not in the least explain

why the comic makes us laugh. How, indeed, should it come about that

this particular logical relation, as soon as it is perceived,

contracts, expands and shakes our limbs, whilst all other relations

leave the body unaffected? It is not from this point of view that we

shall approach the problem. To understand laughter, we must put it

back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all

must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social

one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our

investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life

in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification.

Let us clearly mark the point towards which our three preliminary

observations are converging. The comic will come into being, it

appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one

of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into

play nothing but their intelligence. What, now, is the particular

point on which their attention will have to be concentrated, and

what will here be the function of intelligence? To reply to these

questions will be at once to come to closer grips with the problem.

But here a few examples have become indispensable.

II

A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by

burst out laughing. They would not laugh at him, I imagine, could

they suppose that the whim had suddenly seized him to sit down on

the ground. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary.

Consequently, it is not his sudden change of attitude that raises a

laugh, but rather the involuntary element in this change,--his

clumsiness, in fact. Perhaps there was a stone on the road. He

should have altered his pace or avoided the obstacle. Instead of

that, through lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a

kind of physical obstinacy, AS A RESULT, IN FACT, OF RIGIDITY OR OF MOMENTUM, the muscles continued to perform the same movement when

the circumstances of the case called for something else. That is the

reason of the man's fall, and also of the people's laughter.

Now, take the case of a person who attends to the petty occupations

of his everyday life with mathematical precision. The objects around

him, however, have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag, the

result being that when he dips his pen into the inkstand he draws it

out all covered with mud, when he fancies he is sitting down on a

solid chair he finds himself sprawling on the floor, in a word his

actions are all topsy-turvy or mere beating the air, while in every

case the effect is invariably one of momentum. Habit has given the

impulse: what was wanted was to check the movement or deflect it. He

did nothing of the sort, but continued like a machine in the same

straight line. The victim, then, of a practical joke is in a

position similar to that of a runner who falls,--he is comic for the

same reason. The laughable element in both cases consists of a

certain MECHANICAL INELASTICITY, just where one would expect to find

the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human

being. The only difference in the two cases is that the former

happened of itself, whilst the latter was obtained artificially. In

the first instance, the passer-by does nothing but look on, but in

the second the mischievous wag intervenes.

All the same, in both cases the result has been brought about by an

external circumstance. The comic is therefore accidental: it

remains, so to speak, in superficial contact with the person. How is

it to penetrate within? The necessary conditions will be fulfilled

when mechanical rigidity no longer requires for its manifestation a

stumbling-block which either the hazard of circumstance or human

knavery has set in its way, but extracts by natural processes, from

its own store, an inexhaustible series of opportunities for

externally revealing its presence. Suppose, then, we imagine a mind

always thinking of what it has just done and never of what it is

doing, like a song which lags behind its accompaniment. Let us try

to picture to ourselves a certain inborn lack of elasticity of both

senses and intelligence, which brings it to pass that we continue to

see what is no longer visible, to hear what is no longer audible, to

say what is no longer to the point: in short, to adapt ourselves to

a past and therefore imaginary situation, when we ought to be

shaping our conduct in accordance with the reality which is present.

This time the comic will take up its abode in the person himself; it

is the person who will supply it with everything--matter and form,

cause and opportunity. Is it then surprising that the absent-minded

individual--for this is the character we have just been describing--

has usually fired the imagination of comic authors? When La Bruyere

came across this particular type, he realised, on analysing it, that

he had got hold of a recipe for the wholesale manufacture of comic

effects. As a matter of fact he overdid it, and gave us far too

lengthy and detailed a description of Menalque, coming back to his

subject, dwelling and expatiating on it beyond all bounds. The very

facility of the subject fascinated him. Absentmindedness, indeed, is

not perhaps the actual fountain-head of the comic, but surely it is

contiguous to a certain stream of facts and fancies which flows

straight from the fountain-head. It is situated, so to say, on one

of the great natural watersheds of laughter.

Now, the effect of absentmindedness may gather strength in its turn.

There is a general law, the first example of which we have just

encountered, and which we will formulate in the following terms:

when a certain comic effect has its origin in a certain cause, the

more natural we regard the cause to be, the more comic shall we find

the effect. Even now we laugh at absentmindedness when presented to

us as a simple fact. Still more laughable will be the

absentmindedness we have seen springing up and growing before our

very eyes, with whose origin we are acquainted and whose life-

history we can reconstruct. To choose a definite example: suppose a

man has taken to reading nothing but romances of love and chivalry.

Attracted and fascinated by his heroes, his thoughts and intentions

gradually turn more and more towards them, till one fine day we find

him walking among us like a somnambulist. His actions are

distractions. But then his distractions can be traced back to a

definite, positive cause. They are no longer cases of ABSENCE of

mind, pure and simple; they find their explanation in the PRESENCE

of the individual in quite definite, though imaginary, surroundings.

Doubtless a fall is always a fall, but it is one thing to tumble

into a well because you were looking anywhere but in front of you,

it is quite another thing to fall into it because you were intent

upon a star. It was certainly a star at which Don Quixote was

gazing. How profound is the comic element in the over-romantic,

Utopian bent of mind! And yet, if you reintroduce the idea of

absentmindedness, which acts as a go-between, you will see this

profound comic element uniting with the most superficial type. Yes,

indeed, these whimsical wild enthusiasts, these madmen who are yet

so strangely reasonable, excite us to laughter by playing on the

same chords within ourselves, by setting in motion the same inner

mechanism, as does the victim of a practical joke or the passer-by

who slips down in the street. They, too, are runners who fall and

simple souls who are being hoaxed--runners after the ideal who

stumble over realities, child-like dreamers for whom life delights

to lie in wait. But, above all, they are past-masters in

absentmindedness, with this superiority over their fellows that

their absentmindedness is systematic and organised around one

central idea, and that their mishaps are also quite coherent, thanks

to the inexorable logic which reality applies to the correction of

dreams, so that they kindle in those around them, by a series of

cumulative effects, a hilarity capable of unlimited expansion.

Now, let us go a little further. Might not certain vices have the

same relation to character that the rigidity of a fixed idea has to

intellect? Whether as a moral kink or a crooked twist given to the

will, vice has often the appearance of a curvature of the soul.

Doubtless there are vices into which the soul plunges deeply with

all its pregnant potency, which it rejuvenates and drags along with

it into a moving circle of reincarnations. Those are tragic vices.

But the vice capable of making us comic is, on the contrary, that

which is brought from without, like a ready-made frame into which we

are to step. It lends us its own rigidity instead of borrowing from

us our flexibility. We do not render it more complicated; on the

contrary, it simplifies us. Here, as we shall see later on in the

concluding section of this study, lies the essential difference

between comedy and drama. A drama, even when portraying passions or

vices that bear a name, so completely incorporates them in the

person that their names are forgotten, their general characteristics

effaced, and we no longer think of them at all, but rather of the

person in whom they are assimilated; hence, the title of a drama can

seldom be anything else than a proper noun. On the other hand, many

comedies have a common noun as their title: l'Avare, le Joueur, etc.

Were you asked to think of a play capable of being called le Jaloux,

for instance, you would find that Sganarelle or George Dandin would

occur to your mind, but not Othello: le Jaloux could only be the

title of a comedy. The reason is that, however intimately vice, when

comic, is associated with persons, it none the less retains its

simple, independent existence, it remains the central character,

present though invisible, to which the characters in flesh and blood

on the stage are attached. At times it delights in dragging them

down with its own weight and making them share in its tumbles. More

frequently, however, it plays on them as on an instrument or pulls

the strings as though they were puppets. Look closely: you will find

that the art of the comic poet consists in making us so well

acquainted with the particular vice, in introducing us, the

spectators, to such a degree of intimacy with it, that in the end we

get hold of some of the strings of the marionette with which he is

playing, and actually work them ourselves; this it is that explains

part of the pleasure we feel. Here, too, it is really a kind of

automatism that makes us laugh--an automatism, as we have already

remarked, closely akin to mere absentmindedness. To realise this

more fully, it need only be noted that a comic character is

generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself. The comic

person is unconscious. As though wearing the ring of Gyges with

reverse effect, he becomes invisible to himself while remaining

visible to all the world. A character in a tragedy will make no

change in his conduct because he will know how it is judged by us;

he may continue therein, even though fully conscious of what he is

and feeling keenly the horror he inspires in us. But a defect that

is ridiculous, as soon as it feels itself to be so, endeavours to

modify itself, or at least to appear as though it did. Were Harpagon

to see us laugh at his miserliness, I do not say that he would get

rid of it, but he would either show it less or show it differently.

Indeed, it is in this sense only that laughter "corrects men's

manners." It makes us at once endeavour to appear what we ought to

be, what some day we shall perhaps end in being.

It is unnecessary to carry this analysis any further. From the

runner who falls to the simpleton who is hoaxed, from a state of

being hoaxed to one of absentmindedness, from absentmindedness to

wild enthusiasm, from wild enthusiasm to various distortions of

character and will, we have followed the line of progress along

which the comic becomes more and more deeply imbedded in the person,

yet without ceasing, in its subtler manifestations, to recall to us

some trace of what we noticed in its grosser forms, an effect of

automatism and of inelasticity. Now we can obtain a first glimpse--a

distant one, it is true, and still hazy and confused--of the

laughable side of human nature and of the ordinary function of

laughter.

What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert

attention that discerns the outlines of the present situation,

together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to

adapt ourselves in consequence. TENSION and ELASTICITY are two

forces, mutually complementary, which life brings into play. If

these two forces are lacking in the body to any considerable extent,

we have sickness and infirmity and accidents of every kind. If they

are lacking in the mind, we find every degree of mental deficiency,

every variety of insanity. Finally, if they are lacking in the

character, we have cases of the gravest inadaptability to social

life, which are the sources of misery and at times the causes of

crime. Once these elements of inferiority that affect the serious

side of existence are removed--and they tend to eliminate themselves

in what has been called the struggle for life--the person can live,

and that in common with other persons. But society asks for

something more; it is not satisfied with simply living, it insists

on living well. What it now has to dread is that each one of us,

content with paying attention to what affects the essentials of

life, will, so far as the rest is concerned, give way to the easy

automatism of acquired habits. Another thing it must fear is that

the members of whom it is made up, instead of aiming after an

increasingly delicate adjustment of wills which will fit more and

more perfectly into one another, will confine themselves to

respecting simply the fundamental conditions of this adjustment: a

cut-and-dried agreement among the persons will not satisfy it, it

insists on a constant striving after reciprocal adaptation. Society

will therefore be suspicious of all INELASTICITY of character, of

mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a

slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist

tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common centre round

which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an

eccentricity. And yet, society cannot intervene at this stage by

material repression, since it is not affected in a material fashion.

It is confronted with something that makes it uneasy, but only as a

symptom--scarcely a threat, at the very most a gesture. A gesture,

therefore, will be its reply. Laughter must be something of this

kind, a sort of SOCIAL GESTURE. By the fear which it inspires, it

restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact

certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into

their shell and go to sleep, and, in short, softens down whatever

the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical

inelasticity. Laughter, then, does not belong to the province of

esthetics alone, since unconsciously (and even immorally in many

particular instances) it pursues a utilitarian aim of general

improvement. And yet there is something esthetic about it, since the

comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed

from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as

works of art. In a word, if a circle be drawn round those actions

and dispositions--implied in individual or social life--to which

their natural consequences bring their own penalties, there remains

outside this sphere of emotion and struggle--and within a neutral

zone in which man simply exposes himself to man's curiosity--a

certain rigidity of body, mind and character, that society would

still like to get rid of in order to obtain from its members the

greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability. This

rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.

Still, we must not accept this formula as a definition of the comic.

It is suitable only for cases that are elementary, theoretical and

perfect, in which the comic is free from all adulteration. Nor do we

offer it, either, as an explanation. We prefer to make it, if you

will, the leitmotiv which is to accompany all our explanations. We

must ever keep it in mind, though without dwelling on it too much,

somewhat as a skilful fencer must think of the discontinuous

movements of the lesson whilst his body is given up to the

continuity of the fencing-match. We will now endeavour to

reconstruct the sequence of comic forms, taking up again the thread

that leads from the horseplay of a clown up to the most refined

effects of comedy, following this thread in its often unforeseen

windings, halting at intervals to look around, and finally getting

back, if possible, to the point at which the thread is dangling and

where we shall perhaps find--since the comic oscillates between life

and art--the general relation that art bears to life.

III

Let us begin at the simplest point. What is a comic physiognomy?

Where does a ridiculous expression of the face come from? And what

is, in this case, the distinction between the comic and the ugly?

Thus stated, the question could scarcely be answered in any other

than an arbitrary fashion. Simple though it may appear, it is, even

now, too subtle to allow of a direct attack. We should have to begin

with a definition of ugliness, and then discover what addition the

comic makes to it; now, ugliness is not much easier to analyse than

is beauty. However, we will employ an artifice which will often

stand us in good stead. We will exaggerate the problem, so to speak,

by magnifying the effect to the point of making the cause visible.

Suppose, then, we intensify ugliness to the point of deformity, and

study the transition from the deformed to the ridiculous.

Now, certain deformities undoubtedly possess over others the sorry

privilege of causing some persons to laugh; some hunchbacks, for

instance, will excite laughter. Without at this point entering into

useless details, we will simply ask the reader to think of a number

of deformities, and then to divide them into two groups: on the one

hand, those which nature has directed towards the ridiculous; and on

the other, those which absolutely diverge from it. No doubt he will

hit upon the following law: A deformity that may become comic is a

deformity that a normally built person, could successfully imitate.

Is it not, then, the case that the hunchback suggests the appearance

of a person who holds himself badly? His back seems to have

contracted an ugly stoop. By a kind of physical obstinacy, by

rigidity, in a word, it persists in the habit it has contracted. Try

to see with your eyes alone. Avoid reflection, and above all, do not

reason. Abandon all your prepossessions; seek to recapture a fresh,

direct and primitive impression. The vision you will reacquire will

be one of this kind. You will have before you a man bent on

cultivating a certain rigid attitude--whose body, if one may use the

expression, is one vast grin.

Now, let us go back to the point we wished to clear up. By toning

down a deformity that is laughable, we ought to obtain an ugliness

that is comic. A laughable expression of the face, then, is one that

will make us think of something rigid and, so to speak, coagulated,

in the wonted mobility of the face. What we shall see will be an

ingrained twitching or a fixed grimace. It may be objected that

every habitual expression of the face, even when graceful and

beautiful, gives us this same impression of something stereotyped?

Here an important distinction must be drawn. When we speak of

expressive beauty or even expressive ugliness, when we say that a

face possesses expression, we mean expression that may be stable,

but which we conjecture to be mobile. It maintains, in the midst of

its fixity, a certain indecision in which are obscurely portrayed

all possible shades of the state of mind it expresses, just as the

sunny promise of a warm day manifests itself in the haze of a spring

morning. But a comic expression of the face is one that promises

nothing more than it gives. It is a unique and permanent grimace.

One would say that the person's whole moral life has crystallised

into this particular cast of features. This is the reason why a face

is all the more comic, the more nearly it suggests to us the idea of

some simple mechanical action in which its personality would for

ever be absorbed. Some faces seem to be always engaged in weeping,

others in laughing or whistling, others, again, in eternally blowing

an imaginary trumpet, and these are the most comic faces of all.

Here again is exemplified the law according to which the more

natural the explanation of the cause, the more comic is the effect.

Automatism, inelasticity, habit that has been contracted and

maintained, are clearly the causes why a face makes us laugh. But

this effect gains in intensity when we are able to connect these

characteristics with some deep-seated cause, a certain fundamental

absentmindedness, as though the soul had allowed itself to be

fascinated and hypnotised by the materiality of a simple action.

We shall now understand the comic element in caricature. However

regular we may imagine a face to be, however harmonious its lines

and supple its movements, their adjustment is never altogether

perfect: there will always be discoverable the signs of some

impending bias, the vague suggestion of a possible grimace, in short

some favourite distortion towards which nature seems to be

particularly inclined. The art of the caricaturist consists in

detecting this, at times, imperceptible tendency, and in rendering

it visible to all eyes by magnifying it. He makes his models

grimace, as they would do themselves if they went to the end of

their tether. Beneath the skin-deep harmony of form, he divines the

deep-seated recalcitrance of matter. He realises disproportions and

deformations which must have existed in nature as mere inclinations,

but which have not succeeded in coming to a head, being held in

check by a higher force. His art, which has a touch of the

diabolical, raises up the demon who had been overthrown by the

angel. Certainly, it is an art that exaggerates, and yet the

definition would be very far from complete were exaggeration alone

alleged to be its aim and object, for there exist caricatures that

are more lifelike than portraits, caricatures in which the

exaggeration is scarcely noticeable, whilst, inversely, it is quite

possible to exaggerate to excess without obtaining a real

caricature. For exaggeration to be comic, it must not appear as an

aim, but rather as a means that the artist is using in order to make

manifest to our eyes the distortions which he sees in embryo. It is

this process of distortion that is of moment and interest. And that

is precisely why we shall look for it even in those elements of the

face that are incapable of movement, in the curve of a nose or the

shape of an ear. For, in our eyes, form is always the outline of a

movement. The caricaturist who alters the size of a nose, but

respects its ground plan, lengthening it, for instance, in the very

direction in which it was being lengthened by nature, is really

making the nose indulge in a grin. Henceforth we shall always look

upon the original as having determined to lengthen itself and start

grinning. In this sense, one might say that Nature herself often

meets with the successes of a caricaturist. In the movement through

which she has slit that mouth, curtailed that chin and bulged out

that cheek, she would appear to have succeeded in completing the

intended grimace, thus outwitting the restraining supervision of a

more reasonable force. In that case, the face we laugh at is, so to

speak, its own caricature.

To sum up, whatever be the doctrine to which our reason assents, our

imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every

human form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a

soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject

to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it.

This soul imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it

animates: the immateriality which thus passes into matter is what is

called gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. It

draws to itself the ever-alert activity of this higher principle,

would fain convert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to

mere automatism. It would fain immobilise the intelligently varied

movements of the body in stupidly contracted grooves, stereotype in

permanent grimaces the fleeting expressions of the face, in short

imprint on the whole person such an attitude as to make it appear

immersed and absorbed in the materiality of some mechanical

occupation instead of ceaselessly renewing its vitality by keeping

in touch with a living ideal. Where matter thus succeeds in dulling

the outward life of the soul, in petrifying its movements and

thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of the body,

an effect that is comic. If, then, at this point we wished to define

the comic by comparing it with its contrary, we should have to

contrast it with gracefulness even more than with beauty. It

partakes rather of the unsprightly than of the unsightly, of

RIGIDNESS rather than of UGLINESS.

IV

We will now pass from the comic element in FORMS to that in GESTURES

and MOVEMENTS. Let us at once state the law which seems to govern

all the phenomena of this kind. It may indeed be deduced without any

difficulty from the considerations stated above. THE ATTITUDES,

GESTURES AND MOVEMENTS OF THE HUMAN BODY ARE LAUGHABLE IN EXACT

PROPORTION AS THAT BODY REMINDS US OF A MERE MACHINE. There is no

need to follow this law through the details of its immediate

applications, which are innumerable. To verify it directly, it would

be sufficient to study closely the work of comic artists,

eliminating entirely the element of caricature, and omitting that

portion of the comic which is not inherent in the drawing itself.

For, obviously, the comic element in a drawing is often a borrowed

one, for which the text supplies all the stock-in-trade. I mean that

the artist may be his own understudy in the shape of a satirist, or

even a playwright, and that then we laugh far less at the drawings

themselves than at the satire or comic incident they represent. But

if we devote our whole attention to the drawing with the firm

resolve to think of nothing else, we shall probably find that it is

generally comic in proportion to the clearness, as well as the

subtleness, with which it enables us to see a man as a jointed

puppet. The suggestion must be a clear one, for inside the person we

must distinctly perceive, as though through a glass, a set-up

mechanism. But the suggestion must also be a subtle one, for the

general appearance of the person, whose every limb has been made

rigid as a machine, must continue to give us the impression of a

living being. The more exactly these two images, that of a person

and that of a machine, fit into each other, the more striking is the

comic effect, and the more consummate the art of the draughtsman.

The originality of a comic artist is thus expressed in the special

kind of life he imparts to a mere puppet.

We will, however, leave on one side the immediate application of the

principle, and at this point insist only on the more remote

consequences. The illusion of a machine working in the inside of the

person is a thing that only crops up amid a host of amusing effects;

but for the most part it is a fleeting glimpse, that is immediately

lost in the laughter it provokes. To render it permanent, analysis

and reflection must be called into play.

In a public speaker, for instance, we find that gesture vies with

speech. Jealous of the latter, gesture closely dogs the speaker's

thought, demanding also to act as interpreter. Well and good; but

then it must pledge itself to follow thought through all the phases

of its development. An idea is something that grows, buds, blossoms

and ripens from the beginning to the end of a speech. It never

halts, never repeats itself. It must be changing every moment, for

to cease to change would be to cease to live. Then let gesture

display a like animation! Let it accept the fundamental law of life,

which is the complete negation of repetition! But I find that a

certain movement of head or arm, a movement always the same, seems

to return at regular intervals. If I notice it and it succeeds in

diverting my attention, if I wait for it to occur and it occurs when

I expect it, then involuntarily I laugh. Why? Because I now have

before me a machine that works automatically. This is no longer

life, it is automatism established in life and imitating it. It

belongs to the comic.

This is also the reason why gestures, at which we never dreamt of

laughing, become laughable when imitated by another individual. The

most elaborate explanations have been offered for this extremely

simple fact. A little reflection, however, will show that our mental

state is ever changing, and that if our gestures faithfully followed

these inner movements, if they were as fully alive as we, they would

never repeat themselves, and so would keep imitation at bay. We

begin, then, to become imitable only when we cease to be ourselves.

I mean our gestures can only be imitated in their mechanical

uniformity, and therefore exactly in what is alien to our living

personality. To imitate any one is to bring out the element of

automatism he has allowed to creep into his person. And as this is

the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no wonder that imitation

gives rise to laughter.

Still, if the imitation of gestures is intrinsically laughable, it

will become even more so when it busies itself in deflecting them,

though without altering their form, towards some mechanical

occupation, such as sawing wood, striking on an anvil, or tugging

away at an imaginary bell-rope. Not that vulgarity is the essence of

the comic,--although certainly it is to some extent an ingredient,--

but rather that the incriminated gesture seems more frankly

mechanical when it can be connected with a simple operation, as

though it were intentionally mechanical. To suggest this mechanical

interpretation ought to be one of the favourite devices of parody.

We have reached this result through deduction, but I imagine clowns

have long had an intuition of the fact.

This seems to me the solution of the little riddle propounded by

Pascal in one passage of his Thoughts: "Two faces that are alike,

although neither of them excites laughter by itself, make us laugh

when together, on account of their likeness." It might just as well

be said: "The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is

laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition." The truth

is that a really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever

there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some

mechanism at work behind the living. Analyse the impression you get

from two faces that are too much alike, and you will find that you

are thinking of two copies cast in the same mould, or two

impressions of the same seal, or two reproductions of the same

negative,--in a word, of some manufacturing process or other. This

deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of

laughter.

And laughter will be more pronounced still, if we find on the stage

not merely two characters, as in the example from Pascal, but

several, nay, as great a number as possible, the image of one

another, who come and go, dance and gesticulate together,

simultaneously striking the same attitudes and tossing their arms

about in the same manner. This time, we distinctly think of

marionettes. Invisible threads seem to us to be joining arms to

arms, legs to legs, each muscle in one face to its fellow-muscle in

the other: by reason of the absolute uniformity which prevails, the

very litheness of the bodies seems to stiffen as we gaze, and the

actors themselves seem transformed into automata. Such, at least,

appears to be the artifice underlying this somewhat obvious form of

amusement. I daresay the performers have never read Pascal, but what

they do is merely to realise to the full the suggestions contained

in Pascal's words. If, as is undoubtedly the case, laughter is

caused in the second instance by the hallucination of a mechanical

effect, it must already have been so, though in more subtle fashion,

in the first.

Continuing along this path, we dimly perceive the increasingly

important and far-reaching consequences of the law we have just

stated. We faintly catch still more fugitive glimpses of mechanical

effects, glimpses suggested by man's complex actions, no longer

merely by his gestures. We instinctively feel that the usual devices

of comedy, the periodical repetition of a word or a scene, the

systematic inversion of the parts, the geometrical development of a

farcical misunderstanding, and many other stage contrivances, must

derive their comic force from the same source,--the art of the

playwright probably consisting in setting before us an obvious

clockwork arrangement of human events, while carefully preserving an

outward aspect of probability and thereby retaining something of the

suppleness of life. But we must not forestall results which will be

duly disclosed in the course of our analysis.

V

Before going further, let us halt a moment and glance around. As we

hinted at the outset of this study, it would be idle to attempt to

derive every comic effect from one simple formula. The formula

exists well enough in a certain sense, but its development does not

follow a straightforward course. What I mean is that the process of

deduction ought from time to time to stop and study certain

culminating effects, and that these effects each appear as models

round which new effects resembling them take their places in a

circle. These latter are not deductions from the formula, but are

comic through their relationship with those that are. To quote

Pascal again, I see no objection, at this stage, to defining the

process by the curve which that geometrician studied under the name

of roulette or cycloid,--the curve traced by a point in the

circumference of a wheel when the carriage is advancing in a

straight line: this point turns like the wheel, though it advances

like the carriage. Or else we might think of an immense avenue such

as are to be seen in the forest of Fontainebleau, with crosses at

intervals to indicate the cross-ways: at each of these we shall walk

round the cross, explore for a while the paths that open out before

us, and then return to our original course. Now, we have just

reached one of these mental crossways. Something mechanical

encrusted on the living, will represent a cross at which we must

halt, a central image from which the imagination branches off in

different directions. What are these directions? There appear to be

three main ones. We will follow them one after the other, and then

continue our onward course.

1. In the first place, this view of the mechanical and the living

dovetailed into each other makes us incline towards the vaguer image

of SOME RIGIDITY OR OTHER applied to the mobility of life, in an

awkward attempt to follow its lines and counterfeit its suppleness.

Here we perceive how easy it is for a garment to become ridiculous.

It might almost be said that every fashion is laughable in some

respect. Only, when we are dealing with the fashion of the day, we

are so accustomed to it that the garment seems, in our mind, to form

one with the individual wearing it. We do not separate them in

imagination. The idea no longer occurs to us to contrast the inert

rigidity of the covering with the living suppleness of the object

covered: consequently, the comic here remains in a latent condition.

It will only succeed in emerging when the natural incompatibility is

so deep-seated between the covering and the covered that even an

immemorial association fails to cement this union: a case in point

is our head and top hat. Suppose, however, some eccentric individual

dresses himself in the fashion of former times: our attention is

immediately drawn to the clothes themselves, we absolutely

distinguish them from the individual, we say that the latter IS

DISGUISING HIMSELF,--as though every article of clothing were not a

disguise!--and the laughable aspect of fashion comes out of the

shadow into the light.

Here we are beginning to catch a faint glimpse of the highly

intricate difficulties raised by this problem of the comic. One of

the reasons that must have given rise to many erroneous or

unsatisfactory theories of laughter is that many things are comic de

jure without being comic de facto, the continuity of custom having

deadened within them the comic quality. A sudden dissolution of

continuity is needed, a break with fashion, for this quality to

revive. Hence the impression that this dissolution of continuity is

the parent of the comic, whereas all it does is to bring it to our

notice. Hence, again, the explanation of laughter by surprise,

contrast, etc., definitions which would equally apply to a host of

cases in which we have no inclination whatever to laugh. The truth

of the matter is far from being so simple. But to return to our idea

of disguise, which, as we have just shown, has been entrusted with

the special mandate of arousing laughter. It will not be out of

place to investigate the uses it makes of this power.

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